B-movie masochist Hugo Haas gets worked over by lanky ballbuster Evelyn Michaels in the B queen's first lead where she lays waste to a couple of paramours who fail to see past her pretty face into her ugly soul before falling victim. Haas may gain sympathy but Michaels commands the screen.Widower Jan"Hunky" Horak runs the train depot away from town. Melancholy over the recent death of his dog Haas goes to the town fair to purchase a dog but he haggles over the price and instead finds himself distracted by Betty awing the local males while riding side saddle displaying some impressive gams. Instead of bringing a puppy home he brings her and they soon wed. Being a stationmaster's wife may not be her cup of tea but she's seen his bank book which makes her stay put. She's soon flirting with Steve (Allan Nixon) who fills in at the station and when Horak suddenly loses his hearing they brazenly plot in front of him.The limited acting abilities of Michaels are simply cancelled out by the uber cynical Betty with her relentless pursuit of a life on easy street if only momentarily. She can toy but once in charge holds nothing back. Haas is a bit of a European Steiger before Steiger does some interesting emoting especially when confronting the ugly truth while pretending to hear nothing. Nixon's ambiguity gives Steve a decency allowing for conflicting emotion while Howard Chamberlain as a vagabond and on to Betty's game remains on the periphery getting his barbs in. Haas direction is both steady and imaginative especially when dealing with Jan's deafness and while some scenes have a ragged finish there are flashes of suspense that crackle as Michaels emasculates and Haas crumbles. His introduction of Betty riding side saddle on a merry go round, the horse moving her body up and down in low angle dominating both the shot and the gaze of nearly every man at the fair is as in your face a femme fatale introduction as you might find in noir. Haas would later trade in Michaels in favor of Cleo Moore as his B queen. The more voluptuous Moore may have had more talent and range as an actress but she lacked her ability to convey the tough as nails resolve and misandry Michaels possessed.

Betty (Beverly Michaels) is a cheap dame down on her luck. When she finds herself broke and homeless, she decides very impulsively to marry a very ordinary looking older man, Hunky Horak (Hugo Haas). There certainly is no love involved in her part...she just knows this hard-working man has some money. Soon, this tramp is bored. After all, Hunky is a relatively dull guy and they're living in the middle of no where. To make things worse, Hunky loses his hearing and she is not about to take care of any guy with a disability. Unknown to her, he's in a traffic accident and regains his hearing. But instead of telling Betty, he keeps it to himself because he overhears her saying a lot of awful things about wanting to divorce him and how she never loved him in the first place! She also flirts again and again with Hunky's supposed friend...and all the time, Hunky just listens and absorbs it all and shows no sign that he understands her hellish comments. The audience just knows that sooner or later, Hunky is going to burst...but what will he do and when?!In many ways, this film plays like a reworking of "The Postman Always Rings Twice"...except that HE knows that's coming and he's at a huge advantage instead of the poor sucker in "The Postman". Fortunately, despite the very low budget of "Pickup" and the relatively unknown actors, it works well because of decent writing, direction and wonderful acting by Beverly Michaels. She's just awful...and in a great femme fatale way and does a dandy job in making this character thoroughly despicable. She is much more coarse and nasty than Lana Turner in the other film...delightfully so. As for the ending, it caught me off guard and the husband didn't do at all what I expected. Some might be disappointed but it was very entertaining and worth seeing.

Was Fritz Lang a fan of Hugo Haas? Distinctive elements of both Lang's Clash by Night and Human Desire are foreshadowed in Haas' Pickup (there's also an element left over from Jean Renoir's Woman on the Beach). But Czech-born Haas, a starvation-budget auteur of the 1950s, lacked the depth and style of his European colleagues. That's not so terrible, except that he also lacked their nerve, and as an actor rooted in comedy, the nerve for noir.Towering Beverly Michaels finds herself on queer street and spots in lonely widower Haas a way off of it. He mans a milk-run railroad pit-stop but has $7300 in the bank; she knows because she snuck a look at his passbook and married him for it. Trackside life soon proves a drag for the high-maintenance blonde, however, and she nags him to fake a disability so they can take early retirement and move back to the comparatively bright lights of town; she also strikes up a romance with his relief man Allan Nixon.Fate intervenes when Haas is suddenly struck deaf, putting his pension within reach. But just as suddenly he gets a face full of fender on a trip into town and regains his hearing – unbeknownst to his wife and his assistant. He listens impassively as they boldly exchange endearments, and just as mutely when Michaels works the flirtatious talk around to murder....The strongest hand Haas has going for him in Pickup is Michaels, his off-screen wife at the time. Her grasp of the gold-digger's ways was as firm as that of any actress, and her physical stature was exceeded only by Hope Emerson's. But otherwise the film's cheapness shows; apart from scenes at a carnival which look like stock footage, the action is confined to Haas' shanty and a stretch of railroad track. And, having indulged himself in a masochistic fantasy, Haas seems too timid to follow it where it seems bound to go, taking abrupt refuge in a jarring change of tone just at the end. And that end, too, foreshadows the final shot of another Beverly Michaels film, Russell Rouse's Wicked Woman: Her bags packed, she hits the road.

The reviewer who said "Citizen Kane it ain't" got it right. This is lowbrow stuff to be sure, but for what it is, Haas demonstrates a surprisingly keen eye for both dialogue and characterization, two things supremely lacking in the cheaper and lesser BAIT produced a few years later. Best of all, this is a highly entertaining ride, with a solid and credible performance by Haas as the pigeon who all but begs for a plucking until he sees the light (or rather hears the dark) when he overhears the plotting and venomous bile directed at him by his conniving and venal wife, who believes him to be deaf.Trumping all however is the bravura dominatrixesque performance of Ms. Michaels as the throaty pointy-bra'ed femme fatale. Here's one of the few broads I've ever come across who might be able to actually compete with Ann Savage's mouthy and devouring DETOUR chippie for supremacy over a castrated male race. And leave the male species begging for more.Also in the movie's favor is a reasonably tight storyline which features some nice twists and reveals with great gusto the true depths of treachery to which Michaels gleefully stoops to get her $7300 out of Haas. Again, this isn't DOUBLE INDEMNITY and it certainly isn't Shakespeare but it's charmingly pulpy and has an agreeably creamy evil nougat centre.